URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Fall_2020_Melissa-McCarthy

FEEDING

written by CHRISTINA DICENZO

The spring 2020 outbreak of COVID-19 forced thousands of University of Rhode Island (URI) students to pack up their clothes, take down their dorm decorations, and return home as faculty quickly shifted gears to deliver online learning. URI Dining Services, however, faced a completely different, yet equally challenging task — what to do with all of the pre-ordered food for the remaining semester. Before each semester, URI Dining Services preemptively places bulk orders for nonperishable and frozen foods. This is no small task as the University expects to serve students up to 12,000 meals per day, according to URI Director of Dining and Retail Food Services, Pierre St-Germain. URI must purchase enough food to supply its two dining halls, seven retail food facilities, and newly introduced mobile food truck. The University had just received, by St-Germain’s estimate, close to $1 million in food supplies for the 2020 spring semester before COVID-19 forced campus operations to shut down. This left almost an entire semester’s worth of food destined for donation or the compost bin.

Then, the Rhode Island Office of Healthy Aging (RIOHA) reached out to URI Vice President for Student Affairs Kathy Collins with a proposition: Could the RIOHA and the University pool their resources to help feed Rhode Island senior citizens? Absolutely! COVID-19 safety measures restricted many senior centers from offering in-person community meals to residents, which meant that this at-risk population across the state no longer had access to daily meals. Vice President Collins directed the RIOHA to URI Dining, and St-Germain jumped at the chance to take on a new project and put the spring semester food to use. St-Germain and the dining team refocused on adapting the University’s food services program for the pandemic. The team created take-away boxed meals in an effort to limit the potential for COVID-19 transmission. St-Germain described the URI Dining Services staff members as a team of doers. They were eager to channel their energy into a new project. In conjunction with the RIOHA, St-Germain’s team identified five communities — Cumberland, Providence, East Providence, Westerly, and South Kingstown/Narragansett — most in need of weekly food donations. Once active, the URI delivery team visited one to two of those communities each weekday. In the

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